A Year in Reading: Leslie Jamison

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Where do I start? The year was full of chances to read new work from authors I already loved: I ingested Marilynne Robinson’sLila in a tiny Parisian garret like I was binging on communion wafers, and I felt a crazy gratitude for the ragged, stunning insight of Charles D’Ambrosio’s new essay collection, Loitering. I gave several days of my life to total immersion in Michelle Huneven’s latest novel, Off Course — one of those books that casts a deliciously addictive spell over the days it occupies, then lingers long afterwards with its questions and insights and strokes of emotional acuity: it kept me racing back to my apartment just so I could curl up with it on the couch again. It’s the story of a woman caught in the thrall of a destructive love affair — the seduction of that compromised intimacy, its price — and the whole thing happens in Huneven’s deftly sketched vision of the High Sierras: a bear smearing his nose against glass windows, boots crunching over pine needles, the abjection of waiting for a phone call. The book made me feel — in the smartest, most graceful way — like it was a lantern held up to deeply interior recesses of my own soul.

For a seminar I’ve been teaching on the art of criticism, I re-read two of my favorite books by one of my favorite writers: Maggie Nelson’sBluets and The Art of Cruelty, books I love for different reasons: The Art of Cruelty honors a kind of restless thinking that resists conclusions; Bluets honors, among other things, the kudzu quality of loss, how it creeps into everything else.

Another book on loss (was every book on loss?) that blew me away and kept me riveted, absolutely locked in its orbit for days, was Will Boast’s recent memoir, Epilogue, about grief and — in the best, subtlest, utterly un-cloying ways — the possibility of unexpected renewal. There’s a chapter about Boast’s attempt to write a short story about his brother — after his death, giving him life somewhere else — that will stay with me for a long time, a man crafting an alternative narrative to hold what he’s haunted by.

A trip to Sri Lanka on assignment sent me down a rabbit hole of research reading: Gordon Weiss’sThe Cage, a chilling account of the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war — its bloody final siege — and V.V. Ganeshananthan’sLove Marriage, a poignantly realized novel about the ripples of that war through the Sri Lankan diaspora community. Back home, I returned to several books of documentary poetry — C.D. Wright’sOne Big Self and Mark Nowak’sCoal Mountain Elementary — that witness certain unseen margins: coal mining communities, incarcerated life.

As fall got seriously cold, I started reading Dorothea Lasky’s new poetry collection, Rome, about lust and dissolution, and reckoning with what language can do for either one, and — brilliantly — Diet Mountain Dew. Sometimes you just need someone to tell you: “And what is not / Well I’ll never know / I will quench the thirst of my stomach / And eat the bitter doughnuts / Under the blank sky.” I read her poems on a crowded 4 train during rush hour and still felt completely immersed — which says something about her voice, how it creates what Olaf (the most infamous snowman of the year) might call a personal flurry.

But the book that meant the most to me this year was one I’d already read a few years back — or rather, listened to and been spellbound by, on a long drive across desolate Western states: Charles Bock’sBeautiful Children, a novel about Vegas and the deep longings people bring to its neon jungle. Its account of a marriage under duress is one of the most powerful visions I’ve ever read of what it means to keep showing up for someone you love, even when you feel absolutely disconnected or humbled by grief. But I am no doubt a biased observer, because — as fate would have it — near the beginning of the year I met Bock in a kitchen, and near the end of it, I married him.

Leslie Jamison
is the author of The Empathy Exams, an essay collection, and a novel, The Gin Closet. Her work has appeared in Harper's, Oxford American, A Public Space, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and The New York Times, where she is a regular columnist for the Sunday Book Review. She was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn.

2 comments:

You can tell a lot about your mood or your activities by the content of the books you read. I always smile when I leave the library. The librarians could have such an insight into my life if they paid attention to the books I checked out. When I wanted to open my own pizza place it was Italian cookbooks and How to Start a Business self-help books. When I decide to dedicate myself to writing it is Making Time for Writing and (in November) How to Write a Bestseller in 30 Days! One week I borrowed 50 picture books. The next weeks tons of poetry. The next time my mom laments that we need to share more to have a more intimate relationship, I’m going to offer her my latest reading list. That’s all the insight she needs to truly know me.

Seth Lerer is one of the nation's foremost scholars of medieval literature and culture and a distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His books include Chaucer and His Readers, Boethius and Dialogue, Error and the Academic Self: The Scholarly Imagination, Medieval to Modern, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, and, most recently, Children's Literature: A Reader's History as well as a new edition of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy. In 2009, he will become the Dean of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego.The most memorable book I read this past year was Kenneth Grahame'sThe Wind in the Willows. Originally published in 1908, it is more than just a children's book. It is a document of Edwardian English fantasy, a rich reflection on nature and culture, and a meditation on the aesthetics of domestic life. At times, the prose is a lush reminder of the age of Oscar Wilde. At other times, it is a witty, theatrical evocation of the idiom of Gilbert and Sullivan. In the figure of Mr. Toad, Grahame has created one of the great literary heroes of modern prose: a blend of tragedy and farce, narcissism and nicety. It is as if Charles Dickens had written an entire novel with Mr. Micawber as the true hero, or as if Shakespeare had written a whole play about Falstaff (which, in some sense, he did, and there are bits and pieces of The Merry Wives of Windsor larded into Mr. Toad's adventures). And, more than animal adventure, the book also reflects on the political and social upheavals of the early twentieth century - the closing rescue of Toad Hall from the invading stoats and weasels resonates with the the literature of invasion and rebellion so popular in the first decade of the century, while at the same time looking forward decades later to Orwell'sAnimal Farm.The thrill of reading this book -- now as an adult -- has provoked my preparing a new, annotated edition of it for Harvard University Press, to appear in May of 2009.More from A Year in Reading 2008